Many prior art fabrics have been used for thermal insulation such as in clothing. In clothing, an insulating material may be enclosed between two or more fabric layers. The outer fabric layers can provide additional benefits such as, but not limited to, being visually appealing, breathable, fire retardant, water repellant or resistant or wind resistant.
Known insulating fabrics suffer from numerous downfalls such as being inconsistent, they may penetrate through the outer layers of the clothing, the insulating material may shed from a base fabric, the insulating fabric may provide inconsistent insulation, the insulating material may degrade or fall apart over time, and/or the insulating fabric may need to be quilted to one or more of the outer layers to keep the insulating fabric in the proper location relative to the outer layers.
These problems are particularly apparent when using yarn based insulating fabrics where the knitted yarn is degraded to form pile out of the yarn itself or from down or fiberfill based insulating fabrics.
The invention provides improvements over the current state of the art of insulating fabrics to provide improved thermal insulation values, dimensional stability, lower weight per unit area, more consistent weight throughout the fabric, etc. These and other advantages of the invention, as well as additional inventive features, will be apparent from the description of the invention provided herein.